GEEKY FILMS AND DEEP EXPLANATIONS

[1.22.13]

For 15 years, the literary agent John Brockman has been posing open-ended questions on his Web site Edge.org. Last year’s question — “What is your favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation?” — drew responses from more than 150 scientists and creative thinkers. The geographer Jared Diamond wonders at the 1950s experiments that revealed how plants and animals generate electricity; the anthropologist Helen Fisher thinks we can transcend the old nature-nurture debates by studying how the environment can turn genes on and off. But the meta-award goes to the philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein for answering one question with another: “Where do we get the idea that the beauty of an explanation has anything to do with the likelihood of its being true?

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For 15 years, the literary agent John Brockman has been posing open-ended questions on his Web site Edge.org. Last year’s question — “What is your favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation?” — drew responses from more than 150 scientists and creative thinkers. The geographer Jared Diamond wonders at the 1950s experiments that revealed how plants and animals generate electricity; the anthropologist Helen Fisher thinks we can transcend the old nature-nurture debates by studying how the environment can turn genes on and off. But the meta-award goes to the philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein for answering one question with another: “Where do we get the idea that the beauty of an explanation has anything to do with the likelihood of its being true?